


Narrow Spaces

by tyrsenian



Category: Whiskey Cavalier (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bickering, Canon Compliant, Humor, cause it's will and frankie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 10:29:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18990850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyrsenian/pseuds/tyrsenian
Summary: They keep getting stuck in these situations, and Will really just can't take a hint.





	Narrow Spaces

“Next time, I get to choose the car.” 

Will turns the key in the ignition and is rewarded once again with silence. He looks up to find Frankie glaring at him. “Oh, so now this is my fault.”

“Of course it’s your fault! You just had to choose the most pathetic car in the lot, didn’t you?” She thinks he’d look less hurt if she’d slapped him, and in some other situation she might feel bad about it. She clicks off her seat belt as Will pops open the hood. 

“Hey, she’s a beauty!” 

“Yeah, well, she decided to break down in the middle of nowhere, so the wooden paneling isn’t exactly earning her brownie points right now.” Frankie opens the passenger door and groans as she’s met with a face-full of arctic air. “Ugh, why can’t we ever get stranded in Bermuda?”

“I thought we were working on this optimism thing.” Will opens his own door and heads out to assess the damage. “Engine’s not smoking-- that’s a good sign.”

“Yeah, well I’d be a lot more optimistic if I had gotten to choose the car. Because we wouldn’t be dealing with any of this right now.” Frankie opens the hood, testing the temperature of the air near the engine with her palm.

“I’m not going to apologize for my superior rock paper scissors skills. Or my generally excellent taste in cars.” He looks under the hood and frowns. “This one just happens to be having a little bit of engine trouble.”

Frankie rolls her eyes. “Yeah. Just a little.” 

“Remember that town we just drove through?” She nods slowly, squinting at Will in suspicion as he continues to speak. “How far do you think we’ve gone since then--five miles?”

“We’re walking, aren’t we,” she growls.

“Five miles isn’t that far. It’s barely even below freezing!” 

“Will?”

“Yeah,”

“I hate you.”

***

“Twenty questions?” He gets no response but the crunch of snow as Frankie continues four paces ahead of him on the shoulder of the empty road. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“I could kill you right now,” she muses without turning to look at him.

Will is quiet for a moment before he decides to ask, “Why didn’t you?” 

“Huh?” 

“In France. Why didn’t you kill me?”

She stops so suddenly he almost walks into her, finally turning around to face him. “Will, I don’t think now is a good time to have this conversation.” 

He throws up his hands in frustration. “There’s literally nothing but trees and snow for miles. Comms are down and I’m not interrupting anything. What else could we possibly be doing?”

“Walking.” She turns, setting off again toward town.

“Seriously?” Will takes a few quick steps to catch up, walking next to her now in the road. “I find out from Ollerman--  _ Ollerman,  _ of all people-- that you’d not only planned but gotten departmental permission to kill me. And yeah, I know it was cold and you were cranky. But I think I deserve a real explanation.”

She sighs. “Look, it wasn’t personal.”

“Easy for you to say,” he huffs, “You weren’t the one about to be killed.” He considers the events of that mission and adds, “By me.”

“You locked me in a trunk!” She says.

_ “You _ locked  _ me _ in a trunk!”

Frankie shrugs. “You were getting in the way.” 

“And you weren’t?”

“My mission was more important that your mission,” she tells the ground in front of her. “If you’d gotten ahold of Standish and locked him up, the CIA would’ve had no way of knowing how many of their agents had been compromised. Someone would’ve had to decide whether the intelligence they were gathering was worth leaving them in the field with their covers potentially blown. Was that certainty worth the life of one FBI agent? Yeah, I think it would have been. ”

“I know our agencies don’t talk to each other very much, but doesn’t that seem a little… excessive?” 

Frankie turns her head to face Will, her eyes wide. “You think Ollerman was trying to get you killed?” 

He looks just as surprised as she is. “Wow, I hate him so much more now.” 

“It makes sense though-- he really shouldn’t have given you that mission. You weren’t emotionally ready.” 

“I resent that,” 

Frankie shrugs, and they spend the next few minutes in silence. It’s gotten noticeably colder since they started walking, their shadows stretching out behind them as the sun starts to dip below the trees. They’ve gone more than five miles at this point, but she’s not going to say anything about that just yet.

She’s concentrating on the thickening layer of snow on the road when he speaks again. “You never answered my original question. Why didn’t you kill me?” 

“It would’ve caused a bit of a disruption on that train. I didn’t have much of an opportunity after that.” She answers like she’s explaining why she didn’t have time to pick up bread from the grocery store.  He thinks he’d find the tone deeply unnerving if he didn’t know her quite so well, but decides it’s still a bit unsettling .

“So I’d be dead right now if you hadn’t gotten shot?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.” He can see that she’s telling the truth and that the uncertainty troubles her; she may be a great agent but her face is shockingly transparent at times. Or maybe she does it intentionally, lets him read what she can’t quite bring herself to say. 

He thought she was finished, but she keeps going after a pause . “You’re a competent agent and a good person and I… didn’t hate working with you. But if you had given me a reason, yeah, I probably would have killed you.” Her next sentence is so quiet it’s almost lost to the sounds of their footsteps and the falling snow. “For the record, I’m glad I didn’t.” 

He opens his mouth to respond but she interrupts, “And if you ever tell anyone I said any of this,  you will disappear very suddenly and they’ll never find your body. ”

Will smiles at that, just a little, and looks up from the road. He can see lights ahead in the distance and he thinks they’re going to be ok.

 


End file.
